You inherit a team mid-flight. You didn’t hire them. You didn’t set the culture. But now it’s yours—and the results are on you. Some leaders react with frustration. Others get to work. In this piece, I break down a practical playbook for turning around a low-performing team: how to listen, diagnose what’s broken (people, product, or process), land early wins, and sustain momentum. It’s not glamorous work—but it’s some of the most meaningful leadership you’ll ever do.
Category: Musings
My thoughts and views
Finding the Goldilocks Zone: Just the right amount of process
All the struggling organizations I have worked in shared one common characteristic. They had process deficiencies: some did too little, while some did too much. The best-performing orgs? They did just right.
Turning Tension into Triumph: Techniques for Tough Conversations
This article distills some hard-learned lessons into reusable playbooks for tense situations and is for everyone trying to improve their conflict resolution skills.
Help! I’m stuck! I want to get to the next level!!
This article clarifies how promotions work and highlights potential pitfalls. It describes a career-growth framework based on technical skills, interpersonal relationships, and influence. As one becomes more senior, the balance between these skills shifts, demanding more focus on relationships and influence.
Keep calm and carry on: Taming the siren call of overwhelm and overwork
If you are constantly overwhelmed and too busy - something somewhere somehow is wrong. Read on to learn more about my journey from an overwhelmed, feisty, flustered newbie to an equanimous, calm, collected professional with arguably more impact.
A 3-step strategy for experienced professionals starting new jobs
My last manager commended my rapid ramp-up and steady progress throughout my onboarding phase. I chuckled silently - if only he knew my many mistakes in my past 6 attempts. This post shares some techniques for rapidly making a difference in a new domain.
The complicated parts of leadership: Eliminate chaos
Introduction "How can I trust you? You keep telling me about a new direction every other month" My report after the 3rd organizational pivot within three months. Background I was dumbstruck – there was nothing I could say. As a line manager, I was responsible for delivering the message even though I didn't make some … Continue reading The complicated parts of leadership: Eliminate chaos
Ace Your Job Interview: Tips for Landing Your Dream Job
This post presents tips for the interview process and valuable resources, especially during this challenging whirlwind of layoffs. Most of these are lessons from my 100+ hours of interviewing at ~20 companies.
Evaluating Managers: 5 heuristics to measure managerial impact
Measuring a manager's impact is hard since outcomes take time. The manager takes full responsibility for the team - be it stagnation, execution woes, poor collaboration, churn, or a lack of focus. This post provides early evaluation metrics as well as tips for course correction.
Lessons Learned from rapidly ramping up 3 teams in a year: Part I
How do you get a brand new team to become productive within three months? This post describes the lessons and techniques from rapidly ramping up these teams. These tips should help new members become productive within 12 weeks.
How to run better stand-ups
There is a high chance that you attend or have attended an inefficiently-run stand-up. I have seen various stand-up styles over the years. Sadly, most of the roughly 2000 stand-ups I attended were unproductive. Mildly put, most were status reports for some manager or higher up.
A simple framework for optimizing career decisions
This post describes a simple framework for evaluating career choices along three dimensions and helps you to choose what is most important to you.
Taking on scary challenges
You have two choices when new challenges emerge: Offer several reasons why things wouldn't workSeek growth opportunities from the challenge Let's talk about the latter option. Scenario Your team dances through complex rituals every month before it can successfully deploy a big batch of changes. Engineers dread the drain on developer productivity and attendant customer … Continue reading Taking on scary challenges
Doers, not Talkers
Excuses are easy, take ownership and drive for results
Results over Actions
Are you working on the right problems? If no, then focus all your energies on identifying the right problem with the biggest impact.
Being Deliberate
How do you drive change across difficult environments? For example, presenting radical new ideas to an unreceptive audience or collaborating with parties with opposing interests
4 tips for taking on seemingly insurmountable tasks
How to brilliantly deliver on seemingly impossible projects
Five challenges of engineering teams
5 important ideas that engineering teams need to keep in mind to optimize value delivery.
Lessons learnt from 8+ years of constant learning
Tips for making learning a habit and maximizing knowledge acquisition
Kind Leadership: Influence over Authority
One of the most underrated parts of working at any job is interacting with people. It is amazing how much humans achieve via collaboration and also how fast relationships can degenerate.
Not all Technical debt is bad
Some engineers believe they have to go to great lengths to eliminate every single piece of technical debt in their codebase. This focus on perfection ignores the cost of fixing debt, the risk of introducing new bugs and contagion (the chances of debt spreading).
Less work, More Impact : 5 tricks to boost productivity
These are a few strategies I employ to be more efficient at work.
Less Work, More Impact
Habits die hard It is hard to focus in a fast-paced work environment: there can be live-site incidents out of the blue; bugs to fix and meetings to attend. I have always struggled with coping with incessant demands and distractions; the urge to drop whatever I am doing and hop on the next fire is hard … Continue reading Less Work, More Impact
Three high-impact non-coding tasks for software engineers
There is more to software development than writing code. This post describes three of the most oft-repeated tasks I have been asked over the years. These are not strictly programming tasks but help magnify the impact.
Do you want to sleep well at night?
Do you want to sleep well at night?
